Rojo despite the fact that fetal pain misses the point, is that all you can say about what you saw? Is an embryo like a plant in your mind?

Do you hold Peter Singer’s position on infanticide for a similar reason about ‘the greater good’?

Maybe I could anaesthetise to unconsciousness and then kill?

Killing a fetus that if left alone would in the ordinary course of events grow into a sensing, dreaming, believing human creature, so as to prevent consciousness to justify this killing is repugnant. “If she survived to consciousness she has moral worth, if she’s killed as an embryo she had no consciousness and therefore no moral worth”.

Pro abortion positions are incoherent, and our reason is repelled by them.

Scepticism about what humans can know about the external world, (human biology in particular), and our own motivations is a healthy thing and the benefit of the doubt ought to be given to life. Happening far more often than medical science recognises, a supposedly comatose/brain dead individual is often fully aware. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3004892.ece
I’m hearing too many voices so quick to kill.

“History does show us that those whom we would exclude from the community of the commonly protected, those whom we would kill or authorize the killing of, we first dehumanize.” Prof Robert George Princeton Moral Philosopher

The merits for or against voluntary euthanasia don’t interest me here Divergence, the involuntary kind however, even you would be against - preventing as it might some further indulgences before (what you believe to be) your extinction at death. We can all do without the fear that in a weakened state we will have to worry about whether we have been targeted for a ‘merciful’ death.

Clearly you are prepared to protect your own life from someone’s arbitrary decision to kill you, why not protect those who have no voice at all?

We would kill THEM?

You may wish to hasten your own death, for all I care the whole culture of death can go off to its demographic destruction http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FI08Aa01.html

But leave the little ones alone!

A tale of three weasel words ...

1. "We would kill THEM?" No, because "them" implies (for example) that a 4-celled embryo is a "them" - a person - which it is not. Someone asked whether an embryo was like a plant. In fact, grown vascular plants are far more developed than a 4-celled embryo. If you happen to believe that the embryo is magically imbued with some supernatural 'soul' at the moment the sperm hits the egg then you might see things differently.

2. Using the term "PRO ABORTION" for people that protect the right to choose is like saying that a waiter who respects the choice of a customer over whether to have coffee or not is "pro coffee".

3. To paraphrase: "An embryo is HUMAN, and thus must have HUMAN rights". The term 'human' has at least two meanings: (a) an instance of organism of the species Homo sapiens, and (b) a natural person. When people are talking about human rights, there are referring to the second meaning. The two should not be confused (see no. 1) because while an 4-celled embryo is technically a member of Homo sapiens, it is far from being a person as most people understand the term.

Let's talk about "culture of death" and who the real baby killers are. There is an article by Madeleine Bunting in the 4/7/08 Weekly Guardian about the work of Ann Pettifor on maternal mortality in the Third World. In some African countries one out of 16 women dies in childbirth. Pettifor is trying to find ways to distribute a kit devised by Prof. Anthony Costello that would allow traditional village midwives to save most of these women. It contains antibiotics to cure infections after birth and a drug called misoprostol to treat postpartum hemorrhage.

The "pro-life" lobby is trying to block distribution of the kit, because misoprostol can be used an abortion drug. Doctors in the West use it along with RU486, but it is not a good abortion drug on its own. Nevertheless, some desperate women might be tempted to use it if they lack other choices.

It is obviously better for the "pro-life" types that these mothers die in childbirth to (maybe) save some embryos. Of course, the new baby is then also very likely to die. (Before the 20th century a baby only had about a 1 in 10 chance of survival in this case.) The survival of any older siblings might also be compromised.

I am not in favour of either abortion or euthanasia, by the way, although I am worried about being kept alive against my will. I am just not arrogant enough to think that I can make choices for other people. I have better things to worry about than Martin's petty and vindictive God.

Let me do some tabulating Sams:

1. You believe a plant with greater cellular development has more moral significance than an human embryo.

2. You think you know what a person is; but in a deep sleep or coma I wonder whether your definition would still make sense. So what then? The zygote has no brain, true, but it does have what will grow into a brain, just as an infant does not have speech but has what will grow into speech. Within the zygote is an already fully programmed individuality, from sex and aging to eye color and aversion to spinach. The personhood of the person is already there, like the tuliphood of the tulip bulb. One must actually be a human being, after all, to grow a human brain.

If it is more permissible to kill a fetus than to kill an infant because the fetus is less of a person, then it is for exactly the same reason more permissible to kill a seven-year-old, who has not yet developed his reproductive system or many of his educational and communications skills, than to kill a 27-year-old.

3. To paraphrase you want to decide what a person is so you can go on killing them.

4.You want the right to choose who lives and who dies? Explain to me what individual citizens, apart from the State and the justice system have been granted the right to decide for themselves when they may use lethal violence on another? Talk to me about this kind of “right to choose” while you order your coffee.

You know what I think the weasel word is mate? Personhood - because of the slimey elitist definition you have of it. The kind of definition: that justifies the killing of 90 000 of us in the womb every year, that went along with the term untermenschen only sixty years ago, and that prejudices the preferences of the powerful over the weak by dehumanising THEM.

"Within the zygote is an already fully programmed individuality, from sex and aging to eye color and aversion to spinach. The personhood of the person is already there, like the tuliphood of the tulip bulb. One must actually be a human being, after all, to grow a human brain."

So, abortion is wrong because it destroys a living soul with free will that wants to survive, but humans are also pre-programmed automatons whose individuality is cast at conception?

"If it is more permissible to kill a fetus than to kill an infant because the fetus is less of a person, then it is for exactly the same reason more permissible to kill a seven-year-old, who has not yet developed his reproductive system or many of his educational and communications skills, than to kill a 27-year-old."

If you've been participating in the abortion debate this long, but still think this sort of nonsense constitutes an argument, it's hard to believe you're susceptible to rationality. A seven or 27-year-old is sentient and has free will, and can tell you whether or not it is willing to die. A foetus has the intellect of plankton and cannot. The day an embryo can tell me it wants to live and why, I'll become a pro-lifer.

Martin: "You think you know what a person is" ... "The zygote has no brain, true, but it does have what will grow into a brain"

And you think you can predict the future. A zygote may die (in fact most do before birth due to genetic defects), .. more below ...

"Killing a fetus that if left alone would in the ordinary course of events grow into a sensing, dreaming, believing human creature, so as to prevent consciousness to justify this killing is repugnant."

Your line of reasoning would lead us to stop recycling old cars, because someone might have sex in the back of one and conceive a baby.

Martin: "Within the zygote is an already fully programmed individuality" ... "and aversion to spinach.".,.. "The personhood of the person is already there, like the tuliphood of the tulip bulb"

Sorry, you are quite wrong there. Much of this is determined by environment. As for the tulip bulb, you mean a tulip cell, since each cell can lead to a tulip plant. In fact, each cell in your body could in theory be used to clone you because it has your DNA. On no - don't let them take blood, they are killing millions of personhoods :-)

"To paraphrase you want to decide what a person is so you can go on killing them."

The sentence is tautological. It makes about as much sense as 'you want to decide whether rocks are people so you can go on killing them'. The correct paraphrase is: 'you want to decide what a person is so you can avoid killing them', in which case that is true. I'd prefer not to kill any embryos either by the way, but this is not about me, this is about freedom of choice.

And of course, the inevitable comparison to Nazi Germany .. the last bastion of a failed debater.